Plenty to adore in ode to love, language
Love’s Labour’s Lost
(out of 4) By William Shakespeare, directed for the stage by John Caird, directed for film by Barry Avrich. Screening on April 29 in selected Cineplex locations. stratfordfestival.ca or 1-800-567-1600 After the gory intensity of Macbeth, the Stratford Festival offers up something considerably frothier for its second and final production to be screened in HD this year.
The early comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost is a play in love with love and in love with language, and the risk of staging it today is that these two impulses can cancel each other out.
Its characters are given to extended verbal jousting, using expressions and references that have become obscure; while this is all in the interest of lightweight fun and romance, there’s a danger the wordplay can get confusing and heavy.
John Caird’s production, staged in the festival’s 2015 season, embraces and, for the most part, turns this wordiness into a virtue.
Most importantly, even if spectators might not fully grasp what every epithet means, Caird’s actors speak the text with confident understanding and the consistently dynamic nature of his staging keeps the action moving and the tone light.
The story, such as it is, concerns King Ferdinand of Navarre (Sanjay Talwar), who persuades a trio of friends to devote the next three years to scholarly pursuits, swearing off wine, women and song. Berowne (Mike Shara) knows from the outset that this is hardly gonna work: “O, these are barren tasks, too hard to keep, not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep!”
But swear they do and, just as quickly, the Princess of France (Ruby Joy) appears on the scene with three noblewomen in tow. What tidy math. Four couples fall in love instantly, though the men aren’t allowed to admit it, and comic complications ensue as secret love letters inevitably end up in the wrong hands.
Having fallen for Rosaline (Sarah Afful), Berowne delivers a wonderful monologue at the end of Act III expressing his disbelief that he has become Cupid’s fool (“What, I! I love! I sue! I seek a wife!”).
In Caird’s staging, this is an extended sequence of audience interaction in which Shara reveals a rare talent for working his way through thought and feeling in real time, communicated through facial, verbal and physical expressiveness.
Barry Avrich’s HD filming captures this sequence so well, angling the cameras to show the first rows of audience members laughing and groaning along with Shara, that it made me regret not having seen the production live, to have experienced the sense of connection and complicity that comes from being in the same space as the performer.
One of the great delights of this production is the occasion it affords the masterful actors Juan Chioran and Tom Rooney to ham it up like the bejesus and get away with it. Chioran is the boastful Spaniard Don Armado, a visitor to Navarre’s court whose love letter to the maid Jaquenetta (Jennifer Mogbock) gets caught up in the shenanigans.
While the action moves briskly through initial exposition, it’s really when Chioran enters sporting a ridiculous waxed moustache and doffs his hat to reveal an even more ridiculous quiff of hair that the production hits the next, welcome level of comic excess.
Chioran and the remarkable child actor Gabriel Long, playing the page Moth, have to wade their way through a very long initial scene of wordplay, and it’s a credit to them and to Caird that they do so with sustained wit and comprehension.
Rooney is the pedant Holofernes, whom the men call on to verify their letters — and who is, of course, so full of hot air that he gets things wrong and adds to the confusion. The actor’s masterful comic timing is on full display here.
The HD filming enables appreciation of the sumptuous detail of this physical production, from the epic excess of Patrick Clark’s costumes (why use three hair ribbons when a dozen will do?) to the loving detail in the animal masks and props in an Act V play within a play.
The wryness of tone — the sense that the production’s all for sport and everyone’s in on the joke — allows the production to comment know- ingly on, rather than endorse, the play’s old-fashioned gender politics. This is undercut, however, by the uncritical presentation of the nearly wordless Jaquenetta as an object of lust, something rendered even more unsavoury in the film version in the way the cameras linger on Mogbock’s face and cleavage.
A final upside to the filming is how it helps deliver the surprising shift of tone in the play’s final 15 minutes.
The camera follows a messenger down the theatre’s aisle and we watch Joy’s Princess register the tragic news he brings, even before he speaks it.
Suddenly and expertly, we’re in a romantic world of sadness.
Once again, HD technology is helping an expert staging of Shakespeare reach an ever wider audience.